If you read the article, it's clear the user limit was a technical limit and not a freemium limit. So even if they did pay, Slack would still not have been able to accommodate all their users.
Which leads me to my old-timer question: What's wrong with IRC?
There's nothing wrong with IRC except for the fact that the user experience in an IRC client is generally horrible. They're not pretty, there's no good account system so users can easily spoof being someone else, the logging isn't great by default, sharing files is hard, and whether or not you can do media embedding depends on the channel setup.
There's a reason why companies like Slack have built billion dollar businesses doing ostensibly the same thing as IRC, and it's because IRC doesn't offer enough value even if it's free.
I contend that my question was slightly snarky. As someone who moves from computer to computer a lot, having a unified client is quite critical. With IRC and Bitleebee, I can combine a lot of protocols in one client, keep it running in a screen, and access it via SSH.
I realise my setup is hardly common, and I contend that the main issues with IRC are the clients and the account systems. However, both those issues (among other issues) could be resolved with the IRC protocol, allowing people preferring other clients to continue to user their clients.
Message logging and account management can be done server-side (e.g. closing connections on users if they don't log in), and with a dedicated client to this server, the logging in-part could be done rather seamlessly, even if posing slightly more 'troubles' for other IRC clients.
But as implied in the other replies to my post, but is there any money in that? Maybe licencing the servers? I dunno. I'd love to do something like that, but it would be a full time effort, I fear.
> With IRC and Bitleebee, I can combine a lot of protocols in one client, keep it running in a screen, and access it via SSH.
At which point you're not really using IRC. You're using the Bittleebee-commands-over-SSH protocol.
This protocol has a number of issues: it requires having a server with a unix user account running on it (which is a massive attack surface, no-one can offer a server like that for free or it will be used to DDoS other people etc). Its phone apps are poorly integrated and drain battery. Its UI in general is very undiscoverable; the logging interface is still pretty awful (e.g. tracking of how far you've read is pretty poor). Sending files or voicechatting is even harder than it is in vanilla IRC.
> both those issues (among other issues) could be resolved with the IRC protocol, allowing people preferring other clients to continue to user their clients.
Slack offers an IRC gateway, which gives about as good an IRC experience as any extended-IRC protocol ever could.
I apologise, I wasn't clear. I primarily use IRC, but I also use Bitleebee, but it isn't my primarily protocol(s). I just meant that I could combine all these protocols in one client.
As for Slack's IRC gateway, I think it's pretty decent, yes. I personally prefer it to Slack's own client (again, that's just me). But this is what bothers me about Discord, because that doesn't offer an IRC gateway, and I am forced to use their client(s).
And if you're like me - which apparently few are - and you are in many different communities, that use different protocols to communicate, having a bunch of different clients just means more hassle.
Most of the communities I'm part of are onto Discord now, and that's a lot nicer experience in terms of having them all in once place than Biteebee ever was.
I'm all for federation and open protocols, I wish Discord had gateways and I'm hopeful for Matrix. But I don't think IRC is the answer: it's inherently without identity, inherently text-only, inherently historyless. These problems can't be solved well without protocol changes, but for whatever reason IRC has developed a community that is hostile to any protocol improvements and preferes to encourage ad-hoc hacks for these aspects, none of which works well and most of which don't work at all.
I definitely agree that IRC would do well to have improvements, like an IRC/2.0 protocol. But no one is willing to get involved, likely because A) they don't want to develop a standard no one will use, B) get bogged in draft committees for years and C) they just aren't motivated.
I only proposed intermediate solutions, because I thought that would be more likely to actually amount to something. Kind of like when Google did SPDY to push for HTTP/2.0, but you'd need a player the size and with the interest of Google to do IRC/2.0. Someone to make the decisions.
It's almost ridiculous that something as ubiquitous as instant communication doesn't get more serious attention.
I don't think building it as a tower of IRC extensions will ever work. You get stuck on "good enough", and the IRC userbase is aggressively anti-centralisation (far more so than the HTTP userbase), anti-change even, and text-oriented.
I've long since given up on any effort to make IRC good. I think energy is more productively spent on ground-up protocols that can include the good parts of IRC but also solve the problems I mentioned. Matrix is where most of my hope is going at the moment.
> there's no good account system so users can easily spoof being someone else
Probably the big one for me; I know my previous boss was asking if there was a SSO option because that would be the only thing he saw as limitation in IRC.
Check out Kiwiirc, it's pretty good looking! A decent front-end team could build a nice interface.
Of course. But they haven't. Kiwi isn't bad for an IRC client, but it's way behind Slack.
I believe that NickServ takes care of this.
Nickserv is hard for a typical user to understand. The number of times someone thinks they've registered a name when they actually haven't demonstrates that. Ghosting makes it harder too.
I used IRC for about a decade. I used even more esoteric online chat services like telnet talkers and MUSHs too. They're great if you learn how to use them. But that's the key difference - you don't need to learn Slack. It works how you'd expect it to work. A user can just pick it up and do things with it. That's a massive difference, and possibly the main reason why Slack can charge a decent price for their product.
IRC lacks a well designed UX that works cross platform (desktop cross os, mobile, web) and an easy API to integrate and play with other services like Github.
I like IRC, recently started using irccloud. That makes sharing files easier, also keeps a history of the irc channels you are in, and makes it look more pretty.
It's a combination of both worlds I suppose. So far I am enjoying it.
I use WeeChat (https://weechat.org/, running on my server) and Glowing Bear (https://github.com/glowing-bear/glowing-bear) to connect to it from wherever I am (desktop or mobile), it works very nicely. Because it's self-hosted, it has higher setup overhead than signing up to slack, of course. But it does solve IRC's mobile and multi-device problems for me wonderfully. (I'm one of the Glowing Bear developers)
Only if you use plain IRC. If you use something like irccloud, that is prevented. Which can be thought of as a "webwrapper" for IRC. I have been using it for some time now and I enjoy it.
Which leads me to my old-timer question: What's wrong with IRC?